New features, a big event, and important announcements marked December as a milestone month for the WordPress community.

Release of WordPress 5.0

On December 6 WordPress 5.0 was released. This release includes the much anticipated new block editor as the default editing experience. While some users have chosen to continue using the Classic Editor on their sites, many site owners have quickly upgraded to this latest version.

Two security and maintenance releases came out over the course of the month, with the latest update providing a huge boost to performance and stability.

The new version of WordPress comes a new default theme: Twenty Nineteen. This theme is designed to highlight how the block editor can be used.

9 Projects for 2019

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg outlined 9 projects for the year 2019. These projects range from creating a block for navigations menus, porting all existing widgets into blocks, forming a triage team to tackle open issues on Trac and more.

A status update for porting existing widgets to blocks has been posted by Mel Choyce.

WordCamp US 2019 Dates announced

WordCamp US 2019 will be held during Nov. 1-3, 2019, in St Louis, Missouri. It will be one of our largest events of the year and will feature Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address.

This is an important milestone, as we near the release of WordPress 5.0. The WordPress 5.0 release date has shifted from the 27th to give more time for the RC to be fully tested. A final release date will be announced soon, based on feedback on the RC. This is a big release and needs your help—if you haven’t tried 5.0 yet, now is the time!

What’s in WordPress 5.0?

The new block-based post editor.

WordPress 5.0 introduces the new block-based post editor. This is the first step toward an exciting new future with a streamlined editing experience across your site. You’ll have more flexibility with how content is displayed, whether you are building your first site, revamping your blog, or write code for a living.

The block editor is used on over a million sites, we think it’s ready to be used on all WordPress sites. We do understand that some sites might need some extra time, though. If that’s you, please install the Classic Editor plugin, you’ll continue to use the classic post editor when you upgrade to WordPress 5.0.

Twenty Nineteen is WordPress’ new default theme, it features custom styles for the blocks available by default in 5.0. Twenty Nineteen is designed to work for a wide variety of use cases. Whether you’re running a photo blog, launching a new business, or supporting a non-profit, Twenty Nineteen is flexible enough to fit your needs.

The block editor is a big change, but that’s not all. We’ve made some smaller changes as well, including:

All of the previous default themes, from Twenty Ten through to Twenty Seventeen, have been updated to support the block editor.

You can improve the accessibility of the content you write, now that simple ARIA labels can be saved in posts and pages.

WordPress 5.0 officially supports the upcoming PHP 7.3 release: if you’re using an older version, we encourage you to upgrade PHP on your site.

Plugin and Theme Developers

Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.0 and update the Tested up to version in the readme to 5.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums so we can figure those out before the final release. An in-depth field guide to developer-focused changes is coming soon on the core development blog. In the meantime, you can review the developer notes for 5.0.

How to Help

If you’re able to contribute with coding or testing changes, we have a multitude of bug scrubs scheduled this week, we’d love to have as many people as we can ensuring all bugs reported get the attention they deserve.

To keep everyone aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress contributor teams, I’ve reached out to each team’s listed representatives. I asked each of them to share their Top Priority (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest Wins and Worries. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.

Priority: Work on authoring a manual for assistive technology users on Gutenberg, led by Claire Brotherton (@abrightclearweb). Continue to work on improving the overall user experience in Gutenberg. Update and organize the WP A11y handbook.

Struggle: Lack of developers and accessibility experts to help test and code the milestone issues. Still over 100 outstanding issues, and developing the Gutenberg AT manual helps expose additional issues. The announcement of an accessibility focus on 4.9.9 derailed our planning for Gutenberg in September with minimal productivity, as that goal was quickly withdrawn from the schedule.

Big Win: Getting focus constraint implemented in popovers and similar components in Gutenberg.

Big Win: The major refactoring of v2 was mostly without any negative impacts on existing installs. It provided substantial improvements to maintainability including: faster and more reliable testing, more straight-forward changes to individual packages, and simpler contributor on-boarding.

Priority: Getting HelpHub out before WordPress 5.0’s launch to make sure Gutenberg User Docs have a permanent position to reside

Struggle: Getting the documentation from HelpHub into WordPress.org/support is more manual than initially anticipated.

Big Win: Had a good discussion with the Gutenberg team about their docs and how WordPress.org expects documentation to be distributed (via DevHub, Make and HelpHub). Getting past the code blocks to release HelpHub (soon)

New Editor for WordPress Core

Active development continues on Gutenberg, the new editing experience for WordPress Core. The latest release is feature complete, meaning that all further development on it will be to improve existing features and fix outstanding bugs.

Migrating HelpHub to WordPress.org

HelpHub has been developed on a separate staging server and it’s now time to migrate the new documentation to its home on WordPress.org. The plan is to have everything moved over before WordPress 5.0 is released, so that all the new documentation will be available on the new platform from the start.

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version, and if you are using an existing test site be sure to update the Gutenberg plugin to v4.1.

WordPress 5.0 is slated for release on November 19, and we need your help to get there. Here are some of the big items to test so we can find as many bugs as possible in the coming weeks.

The Block Editor

The new Gutenberg block editor is now the default post editor!

The block editor provides a modern, media-rich editing experience. You can create flexible, beautiful content without writing a single line of code, or you can dive into the modern programming APIs that the block editor provides.

Of course, we recognise you might not be ready for this change quite yet. If that’s the case, you can install the Classic Editor plugin now, which will keep the editor you’re familiar with as the default, even after you upgrade to WordPress 5.0.

Twenty Nineteen

Along with the new block editor, we have a new default theme, called Twenty Nineteen, which takes advantage of the new features the block editor provides.

Default Themes

Of course, we couldn’t release a beautiful new default theme, and leave all of our old ones behind. All the way back to Twenty Ten, we’ve updated every default them to look good in the new block editor.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!A known issue: the block autocompleter fails for blocks whose names contain characters in non-Latin scripts. Adding blocks via the plus sign works, and this bug is fixed in the Gutenberg 4.1 plugin.